Will Bunch

STAFF COLUMNIST

Will Bunch has worked at the Daily News for 20-plus years and is now senior writer. Since 2005, he’s written the uber-opinionated, fair-but-dangerously unbalanced opinion blog "Attytood," covering a range of topics (but mostly politics and the media these days); it’s been named best blog in the state by the Associated Press Managing Editors and best blog in the city by Philadelphia Magazine. He’s also authored three full-length books and three Amazon Kindle Single e-books, including 2015’s The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, he worked at New York Newsday, where he was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.

There are many ways to resist President Trump, and not all of them involve clogging the streets of American cities in mass marches, throwing your body onto the asphalt of a busy intersection, or jamming your senator’s phone switchboard to beg him to stop taking away your grandma’s kidney dialysis.

If she’s lucky, the diminutive Payne will hand her election brochures to a voter who had no clue there’s an election on Nov. 7. “It will be here before you know it!” the cheerful budding politico tells one before hustling off to the next storm door, where a muffled voice screams, “We’re eating dinner!” Payne sheepishly props her literature on the doorstep and turns, undeterred, to her phone and her map showing the next likely voter.

Welcome to life in the dreary trenches of a counterrevolution. For Payne, the first few steps of the 1,000-mile journey toward reclaiming her vision of America in the aftershocks of last November run past the basketball hoops and the beige siding of the middle-class subdivisions of central Bucks County. The young financial-services worker is running for the Middletown Township Board of Auditors, a three-member panel that hires and signs off on professional auditors who review the books in this sprawling township of more than 45,000 people.

Payne is just one of thousands of first-time candidates — many of them women, some of them millennials like her — who’ve emerged mostly on the Democratic side in the post-Trump fallout. They carry a sense that last fall’s failures won’t be washed clean without people taking action on every level, even if that means showing up for monthly town party meetings or running for the most unglamorous posts, the jobs no one wanted before the cataclysmic events of Nov. 8, 2016.

But Payne also sees political activism in the time of Trump as a matter of life and death. Diagnosed at birth with cystic fibrosis — the genetic disorder that can cause lung infections, difficulty breathing, and other symptoms — Payne has depended on good health care as she endured frequent hospitalizations to push through Neshaminy High School and Bucks County Community College, toward her full-time job at a local credit union, which allowed her to move out of her mother’s house and buy a condo last year.

Some of her medical care is paid for through a Pennsylvania Medicaid program called Medical Assistance for Workers with Disabilities that Trump and congressional Republicans want to cap as part of their never-ending push to repeal Obamacare. That effort — as well as proposals that would allow insurance companies to bring back lifetime caps or make rates unaffordable for patients like Payne with preexisting conditions — has added fuel to her fire to make a difference through politics. Before the Affordable Care Act was on the books, Payne said, her mother’s insurance plan had kicked her off at 19, forcing her to go solely on Medicaid for a time.

“They weren’t interested in covering me before, so why would they be interested in covering me now” if Obamacare is repealed, asks Payne, who, like most Sanders acolytes, would love to see a movement toward single-payer health care.

This raises the question: Can a citizen save America from a health-care catastrophe or other ravages of Trumpism by serving as a township auditor, where the most ambitious goal — as stated by Payne — is simply to bring “transparency” to how the books are balanced in a large suburban township?

“The people who are upset or part of the Resistance, looking to do anything they can, they can put new people in their township,” Payne said, noting correctly that over the last couple of decades, the GOP has out-hustled Democrats in local elections in places like Middletown, where Democrats now have a registration edge yet the township has long been run by Republicans.

But that fierce urgency of now is doubly felt by Payne, who never forgets that her CF diagnosis — despite major medical advances — still comes with a shortened life expectancy.

“I’m really lucky that I’m healthy enough to do things — that’s why I’m jumping at the chance to do this now,” Payne told me of her candidacy, adding, “I don’t know how long that will last” — defusing the moment with a hearty laugh. “I know one day I won’t be able to knock on all of the doors.”